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services and do everything
from VFX to grading to
finishing. In order to offer
this, I had to look at investing in color
grading and DaVinci had such a great
reputation and performance capabilities,
we had to go with it. Resolve has
lived up to our expectations and it’s
working beautifully,” said Mark Wildig.
Part of the Smoke & Mirrors team
is Mark Horrobin, head colorist,
who is a well-respected and known
colorist in London and who joined
Smoke & Mirrors in 2009. Since he’s
been with Smoke & Mirrors, Mark
has worked on a number of global
advertising campaigns – including
Marks & Spencer, HSBC and Gordon
Ramsay’s ‘Best Restaurant’.
Mark has well and truly made a name
for himself at Smoke & Mirrors. He
now heads up the remote grading
suite, where he completed the
grading for HSBC’s global advertising
campaign. The campaign was filmed
on location in Rio de Janeiro and
follows a family’s move to Brazil and
their unique experiences of integrating
into new culture and society – carrying
out the campaign’s core message
of ‘Live Life Without Boundaries’.
Fitting to the campaign’s message,
the commercial was remotely
graded (without boundaries) on
Blackmagic Design’s DaVinci Resolve
in real-time between the London
and New York grading studios.
Real-time grading was key for this
project. It needed the ‘wow’ factor not
only in the creative process but also in
performance of the system to have an
impression on Smoke & Mirrors’ clients.
“When we did the HSBC grading, our
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colorist in New York allowed me to
take over his machine and grade in
real-time while the director watched
in the New York studio and I had the
agency next to me in London. The
remote grading was the one thing I
thought would be a bit flaky but we
haven’t had any complications with
the real-time performance or using
Resolve in this way - the workflow
is very robust,” said Mark.
DaVinci Resolve Linux supports more
real time color correction than any other
system by smashing the limitations of a
single computer and allowing a cluster
of computers with high performance
GPU cards, so processing is always
real time. And by using a PCI Express
expansion chassis colorists can double
or triple their grading performance.
As the New York office was being built,
Mark made sure that the grading suite
was a mirror image of the London
suite. This allowed the director of the
HSBC commercial in New York to
have the same grading experience
as the advertising agency in London.
This was a seamlessly easy process
because of the preparation, set-up
and performance provided by the
Resolve’s real-time capabilities. Mark
said, “We have enough bandwidth to
play seven uncompressed real-time
2K streams, which is very important for
us to get the most out of the Resolve’s
real-time performance capabilities.
We are one of the first companies
to do this and we’ve replicated it in
New York and London. We are the
only company that can operate at
that bandwidth, which is fantastic!”
With both studios, the project footage is
scanned into DPX files and sent directly
to a server that sits at the center of
Smoke & Mirror’s facilities. They use a
real-time Spirit DataCine, which has the
capability to scan in real-time with both
DaVinci Resolves, Autodesk Flame or
multiple Flames working off the system,
and the files can be accessed via the
server immediately from any of the
grading suites; anywhere in the world.
“When I was approached by Smoke &
Mirrors, they wanted me to bring the
grading department into the non-linear
world and get the remote grading suite
up and running. We chose DaVinci
Resolve for these suites because it’s an
very intuitive grading tool, it has more
than 25 years of grading history and
it’s a product that has been built by
colorists, not engineers,” said Mark.
Australian-born, Mark was a miner
in Queensland before he moved
to the UK and ‘accidentally’ found
his career driving full-speed ahead
into color grading. “I moved to
the UK in 1994 and my first job
was as a runner for a Moving
Picture Company, and as my
career developed I worked my way
through tape operating, assisting
with online editing, and moved
into color grading – very strange
considering I was working as a
miner 17 years ago,” said Mark.